


get lost and then get found (and you'll come back to me)

by leopoldjamesfitz



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M, anyway, basically a long winded version of fitz's journey from s1-s4 of how he came to love Jemma Simmons, this is potentially the corniest shit ever but it also made me feel things like 40 times
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-20
Updated: 2017-07-20
Packaged: 2018-12-04 16:11:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11558760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leopoldjamesfitz/pseuds/leopoldjamesfitz
Summary: His throat hurts from all the screaming he’s doing, and there’s a thought in the back of his mind that she probably can’t even hear him over the wind in her ears. She looks beautiful, even pale and clammy and he thinks that he might not be afraid of that biological crap that has normally twisted his stomach before if he could just break through this seal and catch her before she falls.But he doesn’t get a chance, because Jem– Simmons – Jemma is sending him a tiny, shaky smile that doesn’t quite reach her eyes and then she’s throwing herself off the edge, disappearing into the cloudy blue sky. His screams get louder, somehow, and for a long moment they’re all he can hear.This does not feel like love, but of course, Leopold Fitz did not fall in love with Jemma Simmons on this day.





	get lost and then get found (and you'll come back to me)

He remembers reading somewhere that falling in love was like falling asleep. Slowly, then all at once.

(He does not mention, even in his thoughts, that he’s fairly certain he read that in that one book that Jemma made him read the Summer after it came out because she’d “cried like a baby” and didn’t want her to be the only one, but it lingers.)

But staring out at Jem– Simmons as she turns toward him, hair blowing in the air that is pulsing through the opened bay door, he begins to think that this is not how falling in love feels like. His pulse races, his heart lurches and his hands – god, they’ve worked so well before this, why are they failing him now? – grasp desperately at the pressure-sealed doors but he can’t seem to get them open.

His throat hurts from all the screaming he’s doing, and there’s a thought in the back of his mind that she probably can’t even hear him over the wind in her ears. She looks beautiful, even pale and clammy and he thinks that he might not be afraid of that biological crap that has normally twisted his stomach before if he could just break through this seal and catch her before she falls.

But he doesn’t get a chance, because Jem– Simmons – _Jemma_ is sending him a tiny, shaky smile that doesn’t quite reach her eyes and then she’s throwing herself off the edge, disappearing into the cloudy blue sky. His screams get louder, somehow, and for a long moment they’re all he can hear.

This does not feel like love, but of course, Leopold Fitz did not fall in love with Jemma Simmons on this day.

 

* * *

 

If asked, though, he’s not sure if he can pinpoint when it happened. It was almost like one day they were curled together watching the newest ‘Who episode, her stealing his popcorn despite claiming not to be hungry at all when she’d arrived and then the next, he woke up looking at her and realized that she was everything that he’d been missing.

It does not happen like that, of course, but it’s like that almost.

One day, they’re bitter enemies and the next they’re inseparable. But despite being each other’s second brain, it seems somewhere along the line they’ve forgotten what sharing feelings is like, so when Leopold Fitz realizes there might be something (a tiny bit of him) that might think of Jemma Simmons as something more than his best friend and lab partner, he buries it so deep that you would need an excavator to dig it up. And everything goes peaceful after that.

Well, as peaceful as it can be when you maybe-love your best friend. But of course, Leopold Fitz doesn’t realize he maybe-loves anyone, except for Rose and maybe Amy, but that’s not the point.

Peaceful also does not account for the state of mind he finds himself in on more than one occasion. It happens slyly at first, he finds himself drifting off and staring at her, counting the freckles on her face when she’s nervous, letting her hold his hand even though it makes his heart lurch in his chest, and it’s all completely platonic. Or, at the very least, that is what he tells himself in order to sleep at night. And for the record, he sleeps alright, thank you very much. If he dreams about Simmons, it’s because they spend every waking moment with one another and it’s _certainly_ not because he might, god forbid, love her.

Again, this is what he says to the older students at the Academy who tease him mercilessly for following her like a quote unquote puppy dog. He’s her best friend, her ear, why shouldn’t he follow her around everywhere? She follows him.

It only gets worse when they move to Sci-Ops, because they’re assigned to work with one another and then their colleagues, of all people, get in on it and he’s pretty sure the entire time they were there the men and women they worked with were running a pool on how long it would take for him to gussy up some courage, but he hopes sincerely that they love losing money because he would _never_ do that, never risk their friendship.

And then one day, Simm– Jemma comes into their lab, more or less barrels into the room, holding a slip of paper with both of their names on it and a gasp of air in between them as she says with wide eyes that they have been hand-selected for a mobile team. She’s never looked this beautiful before, and never looked this excited. It makes his heart lurch, both from nervousness of what she’s asking and from the hopeful look on her face.

“They chose us, Fitz.” She whispers in awe, trying to look at the page that he still has clasped tightly in his hands. His knuckles may be white, but he isn’t looking at them, he’s looking at her.

“Jemma…” he trails off, hesitantly hovering over a breath when she casts him a glance, but then drops it, effectively removing the paper from his hands. “We didn’t even pass our field tests…”

That disheartens her a little, and he’s quick to back up how happy he is that they were chosen, even if it leaves him feeling slightly nauseous to think that they might be ripped from the comforts of their lab and _that_ makes her feel slightly better, or better enough to start rambling happily about how they were chosen out of dozens and dozens of scientists and how “it's the most perfect opportunity for us to see the world!” and he sees stars in her eyes, but he thinks that they’ve always been there but he’s never noticed them before.

So of course, Fitz tells her that he’d at least consider the possibility.

And of course, less than a year later they’re loading up to live on a plane and he thinks this might be the end of the world, just a little.

 

* * *

 

It’s not, of course.

The end of the world is actually mere days after finding out that one of their team members – someone he trusted greatly – was a member of Hydra and said team member corners them into a Med-Pod and launches aforementioned pod out into the ocean and he wakes up realizing they’re about ninety feet (93, if they’re being exact) under the surface of the ocean and death is imminent.

So, for a long while, after he finishes through and finds a low grade medical sling for his broken arm, he stares at her. It feels oddly creepy, even though he’s found himself watching her many times over the years and if it weren’t for the fact that the reason he’d found out his arm was broken in the first place is because he had rushed to feel for her pulse and had sagged in release when he’d felt it thrum underneath his fingertips, he might be worried she was dead.

She begins to stir, looking up at him with curiousness and fear in her eyes. He can tell in an instant that the same thing that happened to him when he woke up; she’s replaying all of the events of the past few hours. He’s not sure how much time has passed since they fell into the ocean, if it’s been days, hours, or mere minutes, but it’s been long enough that his hope has died.

He’s done the math, he’s done all the calculations in his head and it all comes down to the same conclusion.

“Enough with the math,” Jemma tells him and he thinks he feels his heart clench at the desperation in her eyes, in her heart. He doesn’t want to be the one to break this to her, but he thinks he has to. Even if she’s already figured it out already. “What are you saying?”

He swallows, because he feels like the water’s already rising around him and he wants to shut his eyes, to look away, curses the universe for putting them in this position. Jemma looks at him with that same fearful look and he dips his gaze away, only for a moment.

“There’s no way out.” He whispers into the silence between them, listening to her gasp of air and the way her voice starts to get watery and he definitely feels his heart clench then, but he closes his eyes and wishes all of this to be a dream.

Of course, it’s not. When he opens his eyes, he feels calmer, but one look at Jemma and he’s spiralling again. He thinks how he’s going to die and that doesn’t scare him. But then he thinks about how she will, too, and finds the anxiety licks up his back and he wants to scream suddenly.

“We’re going to die down here,” she says after a long moment, stating the obvious and he can’t even bring himself to nod.

 

* * *

 

He finds himself watching her again, not meaning to, but doing it any way. She’s beautiful, he thinks, not certainly for the first time and never the last, but he’s so transfixed and she starts talking about life and how every part of them will become something else and he thinks that it’s quite beautiful, but he hates how it sounds. It sounds like she’s giving up.

Like he has long since done.

“It's fitting we're down here together, Fitz.” She tells him, making him look up and he swears that this might be the moment he tells her, if only to get it off his chest. “This is where all life began on our planet, anyway... Just outside this glass.”

She sounds so wistful, and he wonders if there’s ever been a point in time where he has not completely loved her, wonders if this crush that he’d had as a schoolboy would have ever developed into something like this if they had been more careful and finds that he doesn’t want to know the answer. She turns to look out toward the window and he sees his chance, temporarily dropping his gaze.

“Jemma...” he whispers into the quiet, working up some level of courage.

“Fitz, the glass.” She says, like it’s the most obvious thing on the planet. Effectively, she cuts off anything he would have said. It’s selfish anyway, he thinks quietly.

He argues with her, of course, because he’s thought of every variable there is. The window can’t be broken, there’s too much pressure. They’re stuck. They’re going to die here.

But he should have expected her to think of something. Her brilliant, magnificent mind... she’s always been his better half, even without realizing it.

Excitement pours through him the first time, though there’s a nagging thought in the back of his mind reminding him that he’s only this happy because they found out a way to get her out. It seems morbid to think this way, to have already accepted his death.

But he’s done the math.

 

* * *

 

They’ve spent every last moment of the past few setting up the device that would save her and he still has not gained the confidence in order to tell her his plan. It’s not easy to tell someone that they’re giving up their life for them, but he thinks Jemma would not be happy, or as cooperative, if she knew his plan. It’s a bit manipulative, he thinks, but he’s doing this with her best interest in mind. She was going to be safe, and that’s all that matters.

All of that crashes the moment she realizes aforementioned plan.

“One breath?” She asks, confusion in her features and her voice alike. “But there’s two of us.”

Fitz smiles, but it’s shaky and he thinks she might just get mad at him for not answering right away, but she’s doing the math in her head too. “Yeah,” he said after a moment, his voice watery. “I’ve done the math.”

She argues with him, like he expected her to, with a ferocity that makes his heart stutter but he’s already long since set in this decision alone. It’s okay, he thinks, she’ll be safe.

“Why would you make me do this?” She nearly screams and he thinks she might want to scream at him. “You’re my best friend in the whole world!”

“Yeah, and you’re more than that.” His breath shudders and splinters off, shaky and he has to turn his head away from her, can’t look straight at her anymore. “I couldn’t find the courage to tell you,” he adds after a moment, explaining away the unexplainable. “So please... let me show you.”

Jemma flings into him, sobbing so hard that he can feel every breath she takes and he shakes with it, his own tears at bay. She’s whispering ‘no’ like there’s another option even though he thinks she might’ve figured out that there’s not.

He whispers her name again and again, begging her to do this, just for him. It’s selfish, he thinks, confessing his feelings like this, but she needs to know why someone would give their life up for her. She needs to know that he didn’t die in vain, but rather because he’d rather save her.

It’s supposed to be romantic, but he wonders if it makes him a sadist.

Eventually, she pulls away from him and he’s smiling weakly up at her, feeling the tears burn his eyes as he thrusts the mask in her direction and hears her scream as he presses the button.

He hears nothing but the sound of rushing water after that, and his lungs burn for a long while until blackness surrounds him like a blanket.

Fitz is not conscious when Jemma pulls him out of the pod after him, but when he wakes up nine days later, he thinks crudely when he realizes he cannot speak or use his left hand that he wishes she would have left him to die.

She disagrees.

 

* * *

 

He thinks she might hate him.

He thinks he might feel some resentment toward her, which is surprising enough because he doesn’t remember a time when he didn’t think the reason the moon hung in the sky was because of her, but he blames the New Him. The one who stutters over basic words and can’t find use for his left hand.

She doesn’t tell him she hates him, of course, but he feels it. And soon enough, once he’s done with the first stage of PT, she leaves. To see her parents.

He tries not to take it offensively, because he has no right to anymore, but it feels like she’s trying to distance herself away from him, and she’s doing well.

“You’re back,” he says, stuttering his way through it and Jemma just beams at him.

“I never left,” she tells him and he moves to argue. He remembers everything, down to the quick hug she’d given him at last minute when he’d been hovering, how she’d held him as tight as she did when they had both been stranded under ninety feet of water and didn’t seem like she wanted to let go, but didn’t. Not-Jemma(?) reaches up and presses her hand against the spot where his heart is and he feels it skip underneath her touch. “I’m always right here.”

She leaves after that, but she finds him again and again, at the most inconvenient of times.

He doesn’t tell anyone about seeing Jemma again, because they don’t interact with her or acknowledge she’s even there and he thinks he might be going crazy (god, he is, isn’t he?) Silence is a virtue.

 

* * *

 

For the record, it's not Jemma.

But it smiles like her and laughs like her and looks like her, and he swears that if he concentrates enough that it even smells like her.

She becomes his only friend, and suddenly he is pulled back to the first day of the Academy when Jemma Simmons marched through a crowd and stuck her hand out and introduced herself.

She hadn't become his friend that day, no. All because his mouth had not worked well enough and she saw his desperate motions to make friends with her as a ploy to undermine her.

No, they became friends months later under the fluorescent lights in the first year chem lab, and everything about their friendship revolved around science for a long time before it grew bigger than that.

It feels the same somehow, he feels like he is back to that 16-year-old boy who looked at Jemma Simmons like she was an angel sent directly to him, the woman who would eventually become his other half, and couldn't find the words to tell her how much he admired her. Except now, his words are gone for another reason.

And so is Jemma. The real one, at least.

From across the room, Not-Jemma meets his gaze and smiles widely.

(He doesn't ever mention that Not-Jemma wears the same thing that she wore the day she plunged into the skyline from the ramp of the plane, but it stings him every time he looks at her.)

 

* * *

 

“I mean… I still… miss her.”

Talking to Not-Jemma is the only time his head feels clear, like he can finally breathe again properly and it sounds so awful when he thinks it. Like he’s so physically dependent on this person, on this… image of a person, that he doesn’t know what going on without it is.

Not-Jemma has been there since real-Jemma left and he admits that he is probably projecting, using all the energy he has and zeroing that into this projection of what used to be between them. Sometimes Not-Jemma is a little too brazen, she slips out of the mold of what he knows to be Jemma Anne Simmons, his best friend. If he can still call her that. And this brazenness brings him back.

He pushes out a sigh, his chest heaving with anxiety. Not-Jemma is looking at him like he’s just confessed everything that’s been going through his mind, but then he remembers that she is but a figment of it, and she knows everything.

“But she left and moved on.” Not-Jemma says after a long moment, reaching to place her hand on his shoulder and it feels so real, like he might actually be getting better by acknowledging that she’s not there, but there’s still a Jemma-sized ache in his being that won’t easily be fixed.

He looks toward Not-Jemma and almost breaks. “Maybe it's time you do the same.” She whispers after a long moment, and he reaches up to cover her hand like he’s done a hundred times before but –

She’s gone.

 

* * *

 

Quietly, he’d wondered if Jemma would ever return. Both Jemma’s, really, but mainly the one he actually wanted to see. He doesn’t know where she is, though he has his suspicions, and the entire time he just wants to scream because no one tells him anything anymore, especially not when they go on ‘top secret missions’ and don’t invite him.

Everyone thinks he’s useless, and for the most part, so does he.

But then she’s standing mere centimetres away from him, he can almost reach out and touch her if he takes a few steps forward himself, but he suddenly feels cemented to the ground. A part of him wonders if this is Not-Jemma again, despite resolving himself to never see her, while the other part of him is screaming loudly, hoping he’s wrong.

“Hi, Fitz.” Her voice is so soft, much like her hair. It reminds him of how she’d cut it in their second year at Sci-Ops and she’d always hated it so much, but he thought it suited her. She looks different, if she had come in here looking the same, perhaps he would have…

It doesn’t matter.

“Simmons.” His voice is unreasonably shaky and he can’t help but think that he needs to get a grip on himself. This is his – Simmons. The person who know him most on this planet, other than his Mum.

But she’s there, she’s real and he can almost touch her, can almost feel her and he just wants to wrap her in his arms until both of them can breathe properly. But there’s a voice in his head reminding him that she left because of him, because of what he’d said under the ocean.

“Is that really you?” He asks, instead of the number of questions running through his head, and she almost laughs in disbelief, but her laugh is melodic as ever.

He thinks of the video message he sent her, the dumbest one and the cake he and Skye made for her and how he’d eaten it thinking she’d be back in a couple of weeks and when the weeks turned to months, he’d given up hope on almost everything.

That, of course, was roughly around the same time Not-Jemma became a permanent fixture in his head.

“Of course it is. Who else would it be?”

 

* * *

 

Having Jemma back doesn’t feel as natural as it did before. Even without a sense of recognition, and his mind stumbling over words and his mouth failing to repeat them properly, he can tell that there’s something off about her. Something that is hidden deep within. He wonders if she feels the same sense of regret that he does, the one that is so tangible at times it almost drowns him.

There could have been so much more; they could have been so much more. But instead, they are this. Whatever this is. This not-talking, not-looking-at-each-other, not-acknowledging-the-other-one’s-presence thing.

It’s awkward, it makes him feel even more so and the only thing that he can think through this entire thing is how badly he wants it to go back to how it was before.

Before he’d mucked it all up sharing his feelings on what he assumed to be his death bed. Honestly, what kind of person did that anyway? Couldn’t even gather up the courage to share that kind of pertinent information with her when it was free and well time to do so, so he should have kept it to himself.

All in all, Fitz blames himself a lot, and that makes him stop blaming Jemma for a lot of it, too. That causes some level of peace within him.

After a while, all the almost-conversations, all the ones that end with them both furiously biting back tears, it gets tiring. Fitz often wonders if Jemma feels it too, if she feels like she’s drowning every second with him or if that’s just him. And because he no longer blames her, but rather himself, he finds the easiest solution is to remove himself from the situation altogether.

Telling Jemma, naturally, isn’t the easiest thing. His once best friend spits and stutters and looks at him with tears in her eyes and his heart breaks in his chest and the only thing she can ask him for the longest moment is, “but why?”

Truthfully, he’d thought his absence was wanted. At the very least, she had made him feel that way from time to time, but Jemma didn’t owe him anything. He knew that much, he accepted that much. She was just trying to make light of an awkward situation. One that he hoped to alleviate with some distance.

Perhaps then, his heart would stop skipping every time she looked over at him.

Perhaps then, he might be able to look at her and not feel this immense sorrow for what could have been.

Perhaps then, he might love her a little less and could be happy being her friend again.

Instead of saying all of these things, mostly due to his traitorous tongue and how thoroughly he’d thought these things he was saying to her, how his thoughts now didn’t fit into them, he drops his gaze from her, feeling that same suffocation feeling running up his throat, closing it off.

(He remembers vividly what drowning feels like.)

He drops his gaze from her and wants to close his eyes and scream, but the only thing he can say is, “you know why.”

Because, really, Jemma Anne Simmons is a genius, but it didn’t take a genius to put two and two together here.

 

* * *

 

As it turns out, as if anything ever was between them, the whole separation thing didn’t turn out to be as easy as he’d planned it. Certainly not when less than twelve hours later, one of their teammates was dead, something had occurred with their other one and the only thing that Fitz could think about was how she’d cradled herself into his body as he’d instinctively reached over and pulled hers to his while the walls began to shake around him.

His hands shook every time he thought about it, so naturally he tried very hard not to do that.

(Of course, that wasn’t easy either, considering Jemma seemed to be invading his thoughts more and more each day. He’d thought that the separation would give him a peace of mind, but the only thing it gave him was a migraine and a deeper longing within his soul.)

It’s not until the metaphorical walls of S.H.I.E.L.D. (and really, the actual ones, too) fall down that he stops trying to avoid her, and it’s only then because they are both forced into the same room. There’s barely any space between them for a long moment, and it almost feels like in the before time, when life itself was easy for them and they didn’t have to worry about things like a stupid crush that was certainly more-than-that and instead only had to worry about their friendship. He misses it, sometimes, but he recognizes that he’s ruined it.

Jemma’s hand is on his and it feels like fire on his skin. Or, perhaps it’s underneath his skin. It doesn’t feel the same way as the other countless times she’s held his hand, and he blames his traitorous heart for allowing him to feel this way.

He covers hers with his, because somehow he feels like this is a new start for them, that perhaps, maybe, potentially, he might be able to get over this, to get over her once and for all – but then she looks at him and he’s a sucker all over again.

Fitz hates himself, but that hate is overshadowed by the love he holds for Jemma and that’s the only thing that matters on this planet for a long moment. He’s happy enough that the world seems to still be falling around them and she’s still there, still holding his hand, still grounding him.

He doesn’t know what he’s ever done to deserve someone like this.

 

* * *

 

“Maybe there is.”

If it weren’t for the fact that she’d already long started this conversation, he’d think that he was hearing things. Or, rather, he’d convince himself that he was hearing things and move on happily. (He was happy enough to do that, especially in the wake of his new friendship again with Jemma.)

He swallows hard, stumbling as he steps toward her and all he can think about is how nice it would be to kiss her, to feel the brush of her lips against his just once and it’s one of the most selfish things he’s ever thought in his life and he can’t stop himself from leaning in...

“Agent Fitz,” a voice behind him stops him in his place and he’s never really wanted to scream so loud in his life, not since Jemma sacrificed herself for the team a few short months prior. “We’re on the move.”

For a moment, he’d forgotten that they were in the middle of a war, had let himself become enamored with the mere image of her and he almost felt bad about it, _almost_. Instead, there’s a mix of relief and tears and he doesn’t want to have to separate from her, but he _has_ to. This isn’t a decision; this is their jobs.

He tries not to pay attention to the choked sounds of what he assumes are sobs behind him as he walks out, following Coulson, feeling a little heavier than before, but they haunt him the entire time they’re separated.

It’s even worse when he thinks, for the briefest moment, that he’s been injured because the only thing he could think the entire time was how she was going to react, how she would move on...

Jemma’s proven before she’s quite good at that, so he can’t imagine why it would plague him now.

Except – she might love him, might want to explore something beyond this fragile friendship they’ve been trying to rebuild together.

He sucks in a breath when the quinjet lands on the ground and counts backwards from one hundred to steady himself. The war might be over, but the battle for Jemma’s heart (if you could call it that, really) is never over.

 

* * *

 

Staring at the monolith, he can’t help but think it’s such a strange artifact. It has no origin, that they can trace yet at least, and it’s unknown existence both fills him with fear and makes him all the more curious.

Somehow, though, he’d drifted from staring at the monolith in it’s glass encasement to staring at her, watching diligently as she works. She’s quite beautiful, he thinks, and it’s the first time since he’s begun to think about that that he hasn’t been filled with shame for thinking it in the first place. Instead, it kind of makes him feel warm.

He’s been thinking about what she had said to him earlier before he took off to war, as it were, and he’s suddenly overcome with the realization that they’ve wasted too much time – although, is it really sudden? He remembers thinking that months and months ago, but he’d been at the bottom of the ocean staring death in the face then.

He begins a slow tangent, trying to find the right words to put together what he is trying to say to Jemma, to himself, and it doesn’t quite work out. He sees, without really looking, how frustrated Jemma is becoming by his sloppy tongue, but he thinks that might just be because she is furiously working to finish whatever she can on the first stage of the monolith project. He wonders if she would mind him joining and hopes that he’s not wrong thinking that might be the best thing for them both.

A new beginning, as it were.

“Dinner.” Amongst the rambling that has begun, and that only seems to frustrate her more, and he can’t help but chastise himself internally because he’s been getting better at this speaking thing lately, but it’s like the words evade him sometimes. More times than he would like to admit.

“Fast approaching,” Jemma answers, barely paying attention to the internal debate he’s going on. Playing with his fingers, he lets out a small, frustrated sound and tries to meet her gaze, but she’s focusing heavily on her task. “Yes, and we’ll eat it, I’m sure.”

Well, of course, they’d eat dinner. But that’s not quite the reason why he’d brought it up in the first place. Perhaps he should have worked on formulating a full sentence instead of blurting out that, but he’d had a surge of confidence that was slowly diminishing.

“Yeah, no, no, no.” Shaking his head, he tries to correct himself before it’s too late, before she’s packing up and leaving and he’s still standing there gawking and hoping for some resolution. “But, me and you...” He takes a deep breath, raising one hand as he leans against the encasement that the monolith is in, working up the last bit of courage. “Maybe we could eat somewhere else, you know... Somewhere... nice.”

All of the air rushes out of him all of a sudden and he wants to look everywhere but her, but his eyes are focused completely on her; like the sun radiates from her and his eyes might hurt, but he’d be damned if he would look away. Jemma’s look of surprise makes him doubt himself for the briefest of seconds, but her agreement to his offer fills him with hope that he’d long since assumed all for naught.

He’s going on a date with Jemma Simmons.

 

* * *

 

And of course, because love – the universe – his life, is all a damn joke, Jemma is gone.

Gone like a flash, gone in a pit of molten black that form the shape of a monolith.

He watches the video again and again until his eyes burn from something other than tears.

 

* * *

 

Months later, Fitz is tired.

And not just tired in the sleepy way, though sleep has alluded him all these months, but tired in the way that he feels as though he has exhausted every avenue there is to exhaust, chased after every single last lead and Jemma is nowhere.

Instead, a scroll with the Hebrew word ‘death’ stares back at him in the face. Coulson is quick in his ear, trying to be the voice of reason, trying to be Fitz’s guiding force but the only thing he can focus on is the fact that he’s failed.

He’s never felt this desolate in his life, not even when Jemma had left, apparently, to go to her parents for a couple of weeks and hadn’t returned for months and months. Not when he began to hallucinate her, not even when her hallucination had left him alone.

Shakily, he lets out a breath and feels the tears rake down his face. In all these months of her disappearance, he hasn’t been able to hold onto it, to think about her actually being gone. He thinks about all the things he could have said, all the things he could have done and aches for a version of reality where they’re happy and in love, like things were meant to be.

Perhaps the cosmos really does have something against him.

A world where he can’t believe that Jemma is still alive, somewhere, that she’s still safe, isn’t a world he wants to live in.

Moving toward the Vault where they keep the monolith, he grabbed a gun on the way, if only to help him through the glass encasement and the padlock that held it together, and stopped briefly in front of the door, taking just a brief second before he removed the yellow tape they’d haphazardly designed into an ‘x’ and kicked in the door.

Adrenaline in it’s purest form was the only thing that ran through him, and he closed his eyes briefly, sucking in a deep breath before he reopened his gaze and focused on the glass encasement in front of him and, more specifically, the monolith. He raised the gun without another second and shot twice.

It was a dizzying flurry after that, one in which he barely found a moment to be able to focus on anything by the irregular beat of his heart and the screams coming from his own throat. He begged it to do something, to show him where she was, to just **do something**.

He couldn’t go on expecting she was dead. That wasn’t a life, that wasn’t a world.

 

* * *

 

And for once, the universe blessed Leopold Fitz by giving him the final piece of the puzzle, and a little under a day later, crumpled in the remains of the monolith, he held Jemma Simmons in his arm.

He didn’t tell anyone that it was the first time in months he’d felt really _whole_ again.

But he didn’t have to; she felt the same way.

 

* * *

 

But the universe didn’t just freely give to a person like him, this much Leopold understood. When Jemma came back, she came back with a harboring secret that she tried to keep to herself until it all came out in the form of a long winded rant about what exactly had happened on the place they were now calling Maveth.

More specifically, whom she had met while stranded on that planet, whom she had fallen in love with.

Fitz wanted to laugh, he wanted to cry, his heart shattered into a hundred thousand pieces and anger rushed through his veins like blood but he pushed all of that back because she was safe and this man had kept her safe.

So, he showed her compassion, he showed her comfort, and then he showed her all of the information he’d put into this rock that he now understood to be a portal.

“We’re going to get him back,” he said, because it was the only thing he could say.

Perhaps they’d waited too long, missed too many chances, and this was their fate.

Fitz put everything he had into trying to find this lost man, all the while finding the jealous side of him trying to dig up dirt on this purported hero man. (He found none, and he could never figure out if he was relieved or saddened by this fact.)

And Jemma, for the most part, she remained to her self, popping up from time to time to help him in anyway that she possibly could. Quite possibly the most vital piece of her help was the damaged phone that she returned to him, having held onto it despite it’s fragile nature because of the importance it held.

Perhaps the most vital piece was the very one intended to drive a multitude of daggers through the remains of his heart. Between Jemma’s heartfelt discussions to him in her early hours to the image of her and Will, cradling each other in their arms, it was all too much.

But what was worse was the video she left for him, in clear delirium but he couldn’t tear his eyes aware.

“Do you remember when we first met?” She whispered, raspy voice and eyes closing on the image. She licked her lips continuously, a sure sign that she was parched and needed to find some source of water in order to survive. (God, he was so happy that she’d survived.) “I do.”

Staring at the image of her on the screen, Fitz nearly fell, his head in his hands as he carefully hung onto every word. “You were so quiet and pasty and... so incredibly smart, handsome...” He sucked in a breath, overcome with emotion as he watched her pour out all of this emotion.

This was supposed to be their chance, their life, and now she was in love with someone else. This video had obviously come long before Will had. “Quite a strange feeling, isn’t it?” Video-Jemma asked, more rhetorically than anything. “Never wanting to be without someone?”

Oh god, he knew, he understood, he _knew_. For years now, that very sentiment had been guiding him along almost, had certainly been the driving factor behind why he’d inevitably become too frustrated to see the reality in front of his eyes and had dove in front of a rock that they had no information on in hopes that it would guide him closer to answers. Closer to her. “You must have been so annoyed, me following you around all the time.”

Despite the candor in her voice, Fitz halts and feels a tear skate down his cheek. He wipes at it insistently, shaking his head at her words. “No,” he whispered, wanting to say so much more than that, if it even mattered anymore, but it was the only thing that came out of his mouth. “Never.”

“I imagine our dinner sometimes... where we’d go what we’d eat.” Video-Jemma confesses, leaving him trailing insistently after her. He’d thought about it a lot too; a lot more than Jemma would probably have thought.

(He’d kept a bloody reservation for six months in hopes that one day she’d come back and share it with him.)

“I wonder about us a lot, actually.” She tells him and he almost feels his heart skip a damn beat, which seems irrational enough because Jemma is in love with this other man, this man who’s stuck on another planet and he’s supposed to be finding things to help him get home, not longing over what could have been with Jemma, but he can’t help himself. “There’s this cottage in Perthshire we drove by once when I was a girl, some... some family holiday and I don’t know why, but I found it so lovely.”

Video-Jemma takes a breath and he inhales deeply with her, sighing shakily. “I still think about it,” she confesses, the honesty in her voice tearing the last of him to shreds. “A place where you and I could...”

Swallowing down emotion as it filters through him again, he barely stops the tears, though they pool in his eyes faster than he can blink them away. He yearns for this, yearns for having found her months and months before, before she fell in love with another man on a far away planet. If he could have saved her earlier, perhaps they could have had another chance.

“But that’s that, I suppose.” She whispers faintly, nearly echoing his next thoughts.

Perthshire, he thinks quietly, nearly crumbling into his palms. That’s in Scotland.

 

* * *

 

It’s the first time he’s felt on the same level as her since she’s returned back from Maveth, and the only thing they’re doing is standing in front of one of the only windows on base, watching the sun rise.

But it’s more than that; they’re communicating, joking, _laughing_ even. There’s hope.

He tries to crush it, because she’s in love with someone else.

But it’s hard, when only a couple days later she’s screaming at him for not being angry enough about this whole thing and the only thing he can think to do is kiss her until the argument stops.

He regrets it immediately, recoiling away and trying to curl into himself. He wants to scream at himself, because it was selfish, it was selfish, fucking hell, it was selfish.

But then she’s kissing him back, and hope – hope seems on the horizon.

(He’ll tell himself much later that it was his heart playing tricks on him, that he’d imagined that whole thing, that the cosmos has something against them, because men like Leopold Fitz don’t end up with beautiful, maddening, challenging, wonderful women like Jemma Simmons.)

 

* * *

 

“Come back to me.” There’s such a raw emotion in her voice, it’s different from the emotion he’s used to being there. He’s seconds away from being able to rescue Will – hadn’t that been what they’d been after all of this time? – and the only thing she worries about is him.

He doesn’t know how he feels about it. There’s a surge of a number of emotions, but maybe love is the best one he can come up with.

Jemma curls her head into his shoulder a little more, a fierce determination in her look and he stills, breathing out slowly.

 _Come back to me_ , she’d whispered, fiercely – and he would, several hours later and several scrapes more. Somehow, the scrapes and bruises he received from _It_ – not Will, _It_ – are nothing compared to the sorrowful sounds of her sobs as she pulled him into a tight hug.

Everything he’d seen on that planet was nothing compared to how tightly she held him, how much his heart broke because he’d failed.

He loved her, so why couldn’t he bring her happiness?

Isn’t that how it was supposed to be?

 

* * *

 

To be fair, after that, it was easy to assume that any hope of them was dead. Not to say that Fitz hadn’t already long succumb to that idea, but having failed her at such an astronomic level, there was nothing he could do to reconcile that kind of failure.

So, naturally, he didn’t try. It became easier like that.

Separating from her wasn’t easy at all, it reminded him of the early days after she’d returned from being undercover in Hydra and he’d selfishly blamed her for leaving. (He understood it now, of course, understood why she had to, and he hates himself for ever considering any other option other than to understand her side of things.)

Jemma, as it seems, isn’t quite on board with his philosophy on things. It’s the first time in years that they haven’t been completely on the same page as one another, if you forgot about the time after the MedPod when he couldn’t formulate proper thoughts and Jemma struggled to keep up with his ever fluctuating ones.

No, Jemma was more confident in him than ever and he almost felt bad, felt awful that she still wanted someone like him in her life, someone who could promise her the world and not deliver. She deserved better than that.

“What you did was kill a thing.” She argues with him, like it’s the most natural thing and there’s frustration laced in every word. She can’t understand why he doesn’t agree with her, why he doesn’t see the obvious. To him, obvious is that he obviously let her down. “A monster.” She clarifies, conviction in every word and he stares forward, heart beating erratically in his chest. “You’ve been nothing less than extraordinary this entire time.”

Jemma’s unflinching faith in him both makes his heart skip a bit and makes it clench uncomfortably. He’d made her a promise and despite everything that had occurred between them, that was something that he didn’t take lightly. He’d promised to bring Will back to her, because she loved this man and instead, the only thing he could do was give her some form of the man she’d once loved and then have to murder him.

She should hate him, she should harbor something for him that would make him feel better about all of this, but instead of throwing glares his way, she’s looking at him with hope in her eyes and it takes all of him to not shatter there in front of her, unable to stop himself from completely falling apart at her mere gaze.

“Can we start over, back to where we began?” She says, and it’s in a rush and it takes him a moment to comprehend what she’d said to him and confusion settles over him.

He’s not sure, really, what to make of her proposition; not sure if it’s really what she wants, or if she’s just placating him. “Sixteen and achingly shy?” He asks after a moment, more to break the ice and distract himself from the hope that surges through him all at once. She couldn’t mean what his traitorous heart wanted to believe that she meant, god no.

Jemma, for her part, manages to stifle a laugh and keep herself level, but perhaps that’s the strict determination she naturally has. The kind that he both admires and fears with great reason. “Two people, endlessly inquisitive, about to embark on a relationship that will change their lives, but they don't know where it will go.” She explains, giving him a moment to process what she said before she sticks her hand out furiously in front of him. “Jemma Simmons,” she begins. “Biochemist.”

There isn’t one part of him that feels foolish as he stands up and shakes her hand, thinking about how the first time they’d done this he’d skipped over his name and introduced himself as Engineer, or how her laugh and smile had been the brightest he’d ever seen and he would have sworn he’d fallen in love with her then, but that wasn’t the case. It’s hard not to have hope when she’s looking at him like this, with such hope mirroring in her own eyes.

What he did was kill a monster, and he’d inevitably saved the world from a whole lot of shit by doing so, but that doesn’t make the fact that he couldn’t deliver his promise any better. Jemma doesn’t seem to even really care, which is the most bizarre thing, it’s almost as though she didn’t care about Will coming off of that planet at all, as long as he came home.

With a startle of realization, Fitz bites back a gasp as he realizes that must be it.

They’ve always been able to read each other’s mind in the most literal of sense, but he can’t help but wish he could right now, just to know what she’s thinking. Just to know how she really feels.

But in the same breath, he’s never felt more confident that he already knows.

This is intended to be a new beginning for them, but with two people who have as much under their belt as Fitz and Simmons did, it was hard to start from any particular place and move on from there.

To be fair, though, neither of them really has ever been good at this ‘quitting’ thing.

 

* * *

 

Things go fairly well from there, if you forget that there was a point in time in which he had a bomb strapped to his neck, and specifically if you forget how much he’d been yelled at by a worried Jemma after he’d confessed that fact later that same evening.

But of course, like everything in their lives, things take a startling turn when Daisy claims to have been touched by an Inhuman who gave her foresight into the future.

The perception of the fourth dimension is brought to cause by himself and he can’t help but think as this all goes through, as Daisy’s predictions come true, of how silly it all seems.

But then Jemma is looking at him as the ashes falling around them (the snow, purportedly) and she’s never quite looked this beautiful before.

(He doesn’t tell her that, but it’s written on every micro expression in both his eyes and on his face.)

“I think we’re supposed to hold hands now,” she tells him, making his breath catch in his throat as she reaches down between them and squeezes her hand around his. He laces their fingers instinctively, ignoring the rumbling of his heart with a valiant effort that should be, all things considered, rewarded.

Jemma’s hand is freezing, but they’ve always been, and it’s even more so in the middle of the cool night while the building above them burns. Or maybe it’s just that his perception is higher, he understands more, catches more.

“Maybe somethings are inevitable,” she whispers into the night, and it’s the first time since Daisy had brought up the concept hours before that he thinks he might actually believe her.

 

* * *

 

When they’re the unfortunate ones to find the bomb next to Gideon Malick’s body, it’s near instinct to throw his body before hers. He doesn’t quite get the chance, though, because before he can collectively figure out what was going on and make the move to protect her, the bomb fell apart around them and they were both thrown back against the wall. The action knocks the air straight out of his lungs and he jokes as he tries to hold onto consciousness, though that seems like a losing battle. He doesn’t remember hitting his head, but he also doesn’t dispute that it happened.

Jemma’s in worse condition than he is, having a massive gash on her arm and it’s the only thing he can stare at, eyes wide with fear that something that simple could have caused such a wound and he knows it’s not life-threatening, but he follows her straight to the medical facility in their lab and watches, helping when he can, with great precision as she patches herself up. It’s not deep, it won’t need stitches, and he’s thankful for that.

This whole not-sure-what-he-would-do-if-she-was-hurt thing is inconvenient at the best of times, especially now where half of their team are seemingly (potentially) their enemies now.

“You’re hurt,” Jemma says after she finishes up with the bandage of her own, making sure that it’s secure around her forearm before she lifts said arm in his direction and draws her thumb along the cut on his forehead. Fitz flinches some, because the touch is hard enough to make him do that, and stares quietly in her direction, shaking his head.

“I’m fine,” he insists, because he really is. “It’s just a scratch.”

Hesitating so close to him, he watches as Jemma inhales quietly before sliding her hand away from his face slowly, dipping her head. For a second, it looks like she might say something, but instead she shakes her head slowly and folds her hands together with a deep rooted sigh.

“C’mon,” he says after a long moment, placing his hand gently on her upper arm, and she looks toward his hand, the smallest of smiles forming on her face before she turns her attention back to him and looks quietly. “Let’s go sit somewhere quiet, rest a bit.”

“We should be in the lab,” she says quietly, no conviction in her tone and he can’t help but think that she’s lost all of that since finding out that one of their own is the person capable of doing this. That one of their friends are betraying them.

With a soft shake of his head, Fitz reminds her, placing his hand on the small of her back as he slowly begins to guide her toward their bunks before she can argue with him any further, that they’re running all the tests they can. It’s almost familiar when it’s brought up much later, hours later really, and she’s looking at him, so tired, but so beautiful.

When she nudges her head against his shoulder, he hesitates for the briefest of seconds before leaning his back, his breath catching in his throat. Somewhere along the line, Jemma had grabbed his hand and twined their fingers together; it makes his heart skip uncontrollably and he wants to close his eyes and stare deeply at her all the while, unable to stop himself from focusing on her.

She tilts her head up and they’re so close he can almost feel her breath on his lips and before he can stop himself, because really he should stop himself, he’s leaning in and she might be too, and then their lips are pressing together.

The kiss grows deeper, soft insistent presses against each other’s lips until his conscience gets the best of him and he’s pulling away because this isn’t what she wanted – she asked for slow, for progressive, and he’s out there snogging her on the couch in his bunk. He blames the high emotions following this day, and apologizes to her profusely, burying his head in his hands.

“I didn’t mean to push too fast,” he tells her, because it’s the truth and there’s a soft scoff that emits from her lips before she’s shifting on the couch away from him and he tries not to look up, because he doesn’t really want to know what’s going through her mind, especially as shame overtakes him.

Of course, this isn’t how this was supposed to be for them. Their last kiss in their lab had been... a rush of emotions, a collective moment of fitful screaming and when he’d leaned in and crashed their lips together, it hadn’t seemed like the right thing but he was _so tired_ of fighting the right thing. Jemma laughs at him, a light, airy sound that makes him swallow down his inhibitions.

“Too fast?” She asks, incredulousness evident in her voice. “Fitz,” she whispers, and he looks up finally to see the awe in her eyes and the disbelief that he’d pulled away. “It’s been ten years.”

There’s some hope in that moment and he tries to swallow it valiantly, but it doesn’t quite work the way he thought it might, because mere moments later he’s utterly, “really?” in the same incredulous tone she had used just moments before, feeling a nauseous roll of his stomach coming along, the same slowly ebbing and flowing away. “Cause I thought that...”

“Really.” Jemma asserts, giving him virtually no time to jump aboard the thought train that had set sail, returning with the same kind of conviction in her tone. “And since we’re cursed, or whatever nonsense...”

Fitz almost looks perturbed that she’s bringing this up _now_ of all times, when he’s so emotionally fragile, when she is; but they fall into the easy rhythm of an argument, bantering back and forth until Jemma ends it with a quiet voice and a heavy head. He’s worried that he’s said something wrong for a second, and he looks toward her with concern in her gaze as she slowly lifts up and meets his once again.

“I’m tired of seeing our friends ripped apart from each other. That can’t happen to us again. I won’t let it.” She said, staring him straight in the eye.

He doesn’t need telepathy to know that Jemma believes this with all of her heart, and so does he.

“Then we won’t let it.” He tells her, meaning it because, honestly, he’s never wanted anything more in his life than for them to be... this. It’s been that way since long before Ward had betrayed them, long before she jumped off the plane, long before he even realized it, he thinks.

He can’t remember a time that he hasn’t been completely infatuated with her, because perhaps he’s been that way for a long time.

(When they’re older, and wiser, and hoisting toddlers on their hips, much later from now, he’ll joke with her that she just ‘took longer’ to catch up with him, joke with her that he’d known all along.

When they’re older, and wiser, and hoisting toddlers on their hips, she’ll lean across the distance between them, careful not to smack their children’s heads together, and whisper, “not a chance” before pressing their lips together in a quiet kiss, ignoring the echoing of ‘eww’s from their audience.

When they’re older, and wiser, and hoisting toddlers on their hips, he’ll tell her he’s never remembered a time where he didn’t love her, but now doesn’t seem like the time to remind her of that fact.)

“Who needs space?” He asks instead, twisting as the edges of his lips curl up into a familiar smile. “Because I’ve got something magnificent right here.”

 

* * *

 

Given their track record, it’s not hard to imagine that one of them (him) might worry about how that might affect their working relationship, though Jemma seems just as concerned, given how much they talk about it.

It’s nice to actually _talk_ about things, instead of dancing around the situation and hoping that it resolves itself. (For the record, that has not been working for them quite this far.) It’s even more freeing when they talk about taking that next step.

Fitz worries that it might all seem like it’s going too fast, but Jemma had been right; they’d wasted ten years not realizing the truth right in front of them, there wasn’t any point in wasting anymore time than that. If anything, recent events had shown them that wasting time was overrated.

Nonetheless, while stripping each other’s clothes off and nerves bundling between them, he can’t help but trace each inch of the newly revealed skin as her top falls to the ground. He’d removed it (with her help of course, how was he supposed to know that there was a zipper in the back?) and just stared, stared at the cream colored bra she’d been wearing, at the soft mounds that filled them, at _her_ in general. He was so in awe that they were really there, together like this. It was everything he’d ever imagined and yet nothing he’d ever had imagined before had even come close to this.

Jemma Simmons was far better than any fantasy.

(If asked, though, he might vote against the leather pants, if only for how... fun they were to get off of her legs.)

 

* * *

 

It’s a whirlwind romance from there, finding spots in the darkest corners to meet lips and bodies and allow their hands to roam while diligently still working against the Hive issue (which is now very much an issue, considering their only lead had been hijacked by Daisy herself and now they were back at square one) and when their friend is finally returned home, it’s a mix sense of relief and awe that fills them.

It doesn’t get better, though, because Hive doesn’t stop being a problem just because he no longer has Daisy. If anything, he’s a bigger one now that his minions break him out of containment and he nearly _dies_ because of it.

When Lincoln Campbell actually dies less than a day later, they put off the pipe dream of Seychelles that she’d invented for another rainy day and spend the night memorizing each other’s bodies, something they’ve done countless times before now, but it’s longer, more intimate, they spend more time mapping the other’s bodies than they do making love.

And then, like everything, things change. They find less and less time to sneak away from the lab, especially when Jemma is promoted to the Science Adversary to the director and she has to start taking weekly lie detector tests and while he doesn’t think that the new Director would ask her things like ‘what color underwear is Fitz wearing today’, it’s probably best that she didn’t find out because she grasped onto his ass while they were making out in their favorite storage closet.

She, of course, isn’t the only one to blame for the separation; he begins working more closely with Dr. Radcliffe, who’s been pardoned from all wrong doings.

He’s certainly more to blame for the emotional separation when Dr. Radcliffe brings out a humanoid robot that talks and speaks and looks just like a real person and he chooses to hide it from her, not out of malicious intent, but because he knows she can’t know about this, not with the lie detector tests.

When she finds out, it’s worse. It creates this rift that he should have seen coming, but given that scientific curiosity won over, he imagines he was sort of blinded to the whole thing in a lot of ways. Apologizing to Jemma doesn’t seem to make any of it better, certainly not because she’s nearly thrust in the chair again, but manages to weasel her way out.

He feels proud of her, despite the fact that she can’t seem to meet his gaze. He hates himself, because he’s never been this person, not wanting to deceive anyone, and he thinks late one night when she’s rolled over and away from him, instead of curling into him, that this is the kind of stuff that his father did.

Maybe the apple didn’t fall far from the tree after all.

 

* * *

 

It’s not until he’s staring death in the face, or at least dissolution, that he begins to accurately feel fear. And it’s not even necessarily because he might die, because Eli Morrow’s mere existence could threaten his own. It’s because he can’t help but think about how the last words he might’ve ever said to Jemma Simmons were a direct result of an argument they were having.

They’d been having a bloody argument, and now no one – aside from the Director, of course – knew where she was and the last thing that he might ever say to her had been fueled by venom, or at the very least some amount of anger. He couldn’t help but hover over how unjust his anger had been in the first place; he had lied to her, she had a right to be angry, he had… he had nothing.

And now he is practically nothing.

He’s shaking so hard that feeling the steady weight of Coulson’s hand on his shoulder feels feather-light and he keeps swallowing harder, trying to bite back tears but all he can think about is her.

Fitz had been prepared the last time he’d been on the receiving end of death, knew the consequences and knew she’d be safe. He’d almost felt at peace when he’d finally accepted it. However, now, he doesn’t know where she is, and there’s a significant chance that they will be gone before anyone can get ahold of Jemma in order to get her back home to help them out.

So naturally, be comes desperate; when they shove the Darkhold on the table, he begs A.I.D.A. to read it, to find a solution because her mind **can** take it. It’s all program, after all.

And the cosmos, for once, doesn’t flip him the bird, but instead grants him the ability to come home. Come home from their hell, come home to her. The first thing he does when he resurfaces if find Director Mace, like he swore he would, and there’s anger bubbling in his veins with every single word until, in the distance, he can hear, “Fitz?”

God, her voice sounds like a thousand angels and he turns toward it, watching her practically plow over a tech while trying to get to him. “Jemma.” He calls out, wasting no time before he rushes toward her and she picks up the pace, too. They meet somewhere in the middle, a tangle of limbs and ‘I’m sorry’s and tight holds.

That night, they talk about everything, like rational adults, and he kisses her soundlessly like it’s the last time he might ever do it.

Just in case.

(He doesn’t think about the potential consequences until weeks later when she’s walking in, talking about being a ‘real girl’ or some nonsense and the only person he can blame is himself, yet again.)

 

* * *

 

He lies to her again.

Perhaps it’s because he doesn’t want to even explore the possibility in his mind, the possibility that he put his trust in another person, only to have it destroyed. He hates how freely he trusts people, perhaps then he wouldn’t keep putting himself in these kinds of scenarios.

Perhaps then, he could stop hurting the people he loves the most.

Jemma, when she finds out, is understandably upset – but he’s gotten all the data by now. He knows the truth, or at least part of it.

A.I.D.A. didn’t do any of this of her own free will, the person to blame is the very man he spent weeks protecting. Fitz wishes he didn’t taste bile in his throat.

He’s seen betrayal before. He’s stared at it in the face while it pushed a button to drop him and Simmons into the ocean. But this is different. For the first time in a long time, he’d finally felt like he’d had a mentor in his life. (And dare he say, a father figure...) He’d been wrong.

And of course, because Radcliffe is a survivalist at heart, he doesn’t wait in his apartment, but rather lets a decoy take his place.

Fitz shoots him in his forehead to prove to himself that he’s right, but the entire time there’s a part of him screaming, well, _what if he’d been wrong?_

It gets worse when Robo-cliffe (patent pending) looks him dead in the eye less than a day later and ignites thoughts that have been there all along, but just under the surface of his own mind.

All by bringing up Alistair Fitz.

Truthfully, he doesn’t think much about his father much, not because he doesn’t want to, but because he’d learned after age ten when the man had walked out on him and his Mum that that wasn’t the kind of person he wanted to be from here on out. He didn’t give Alistair Fitz the time of day, not even in his thoughts, because he doesn’t deserve that kind of recognition.

(Fitz avidly tries to block out every single memory he has with his father, especially the bad ones, but they all coming flooding back the moment Robo-Cliffe looks him dead in the eye and says, “that’s your father talking.”)

Jemma’s hand on his chest helps level him, but it’s only briefly. Whatever this version of Radcliffe is saying, if he potentially spoke to the man who helped give him life, he doesn’t care.

Or at least he tries very hard to portray that. Jemma sees right through him, but she’s always been his biggest supporter, even when he wasn’t deserving of it.

(Especially when he’s not deserving of it.)

 

* * *

 

Fitz doesn’t remember anything after Jemma leaves with Agent Davis. They were seconds away from potentially helping May and he’d been at his tablet, avidly working with the age-old machines and then… nothing.

Fitz dreams.

He dreams of a world where his name is The Doctor (how poetic) and he is the head of Hydra and a person looking far to similar to Aida is ruling by his side under the pseudonym Ophelia.

He dreams that he does awful things to Inhumans, runs tests on them either break them or kill them. He dreams of doing that very same thing to Daisy, one of his best friends.

He dreams of ordering the strike team that inevitably crush a building on top of Jeffrey Mace.

He dreams of being the type of person who would hold a gun to Jemma Simmons' head and threatens her life.

And when he wakes up, he realizes that none of it was a dream, but rather an altered form of reality and he barely has a chance to take in that fact before the now human Ophelia is using the altered version of Project Looking Glass that he helped design to get them far away from where she'd been storing their bodies as Aida.

They resurface on a beach and the only thing he can think about is how sick he is. He's an awful person, he's a bad person. He hurt people. He dared to enjoy it. Everything he's eve thought of himself is a lie.

Staring at Ophelia – _A.I.D.A._ \- makes him want to hurl even more. He did this, helped create this.

Closing his eyes, the only thing he can do is hope that Jemma is safe, that she's okay. He finds he doesn't care what happens to him as long as she is, though that is hardly a new feeling for him.

Her life has always held more value than his to him.

(Later, much later, Jemma will tell him all about what his LMD did. What he’d did.

Later, much later, he’ll hold her while she cries her way through each gruelling tale and try not to break down himself because he’d done it, he’d helped finalize the Framework.

Later, much later, she’ll curl her body around him and let him cry, too, while they mourn the possibilities of their past and what could have been done to fix it.)

 

* * *

 

Coming out of the unreality is as startling as it can imagine, but it’s so much more tense with Ophelia – _A.I.D.A’s_ – plan in mind. He helped create Project Looking Glass, but that didn’t mean he was privy to every piece of information that she offered him. He had never been that lucky.

He had been second in command, in a lot of ways, but that didn’t mean that A.I.D.A trusted him enough to know every single inch of her plan. It also doesn’t mean she can expect every single inch of his.

So when Jemma asks him if he knows how to kill her, he stutters, because he’s never really figured that one out. In the unreality, he hadn’t wanted to; it hadn’t been an issue. But here... it’s a necessity that she perishes before she hurts more people. It’s imperative that he save his team and most importantly Jemma from a problem he help create.

When he closes his eyes, he can still feel the tight grip she’d wrapped around him hours before, how she’d let him cry out every single last piece of self doubt until it weighed them both heavily down and how she’d cried too, both of them too fragile from the unreality of the Framework. He would never have blamed her for hating him for helping create it, or hating him because of the things he did while he was in there; he’d never blame her for wanting to separate from him. But instead, she’d pulled him closer, kissed the top of his head and for the first time since waking up, he’d felt as though things might turn out to be okay.

That is the exact opposite of how he feels when he sees A.I.D.A. take the screwdriver that Jemma was going to try and disarm her with and drive it into her chest like a stake. He knows its not real, knows that Jemma is perfectly fine, but it doesn’t make it any easier. She’s writhing in pain, looking him dead in the eye when she tells him that this is all his fault. (He knows, God. He knows.)

But Jemma is safe. She’s safe, she’s happy, and when they get a chance she wraps her arms around his middle so tight it’s almost hard to breathe and he holds her back just as tight, already formulating a way to save the rest of the team.

Of course, that doesn’t settle well with everyone. He hadn’t expected it to, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t try. All of this falls back on him in one way, shape, or form. Whether it be from pushing A.I.D.A. to read the Darkhold in a selfish attempt to get back home to Jemma, or whether it because of his involvement with A.I.D.A’s programming in the first place, or whether it be the things he did in the Framework, he’s involved in all of this. If the U.S. Government is looking for one person to point all the blame to, he has the solution.

He can help Daisy get off scot-free, help the rest of their team avoid jail time. The only thing he has to do is grin and bear all the hours of questioning, but first, he’d have to confess.

He tries not to think about Jemma every several seconds when he mentally formulates his confession, because things have been strange between them even though she’s been fantastically supportive, but she’s always there on the back of his mind.

She’ll be better off without someone like him in her life, someone who could do the things that he did, both to her and their friends, but he doesn’t have to say that out loud to wonder if she’s thinking it, too.

Instead, when Daisy looks him dead in the eye and tells him they’re all going down together, Jemma looks at him with conviction pouring out every orifice and says, “Amen.”

They spend their last few potentially free hours eating at a run down diner, holding hands under the table and sharing quiet looks. He hasn’t forgiven himself, and she knows that, but for once, it’s okay.

Hours later, they wake up in an unknown area, which they later learn is apparently _Space_ , of all bloody things, and nothing is ever the same.

The only constant is Jemma, who wakes up with her head tucked underneath his chin and their limbs so entwined it’s hard to tell where one of them begins and the other one ends.

The only constant he’s ever needed is her; and throughout the months of isolation, they find peace, happiness, and love again in one another.

Coming home isn’t going back to an underground bunker, but rather a cottage in Perthshire, on the rainiest day of the year, and the entire time they hold hands and jump in the puddles with wide grins that makes him think, somewhere in the back of his mind, the neighbors are watching and calling them crazy.

It’s the first time in months they’ve both been truly happy, so he lets them.

 

* * *

 

The truth was, Leopold Fitz doesn't remember falling in love with Jemma Simmons. It just sort of happened. But he does remember the first time he falls in love with their daughter.

It's moments after he learns of her existence, long before he even knows she's a, well, a she.

And then it happens all over again when, months and months later, she's laid on her Mum's chest and he watches Jemma count all of her fingers and toes and he bends down and kisses them both on the top of the head.

It's almost instinct to follow the nurses when they sweep her away, wanting to be so close to her all the time already, but he feels his wife grab his hand and he turns to look in her eyes. He doesn't remember falling in love with this woman, but it's never mattered. And he's never loved her more.

All the lingering anxiety he had over being a father vanishes the moment their baby is laid in his arms and the only thing he can do is watch her. Her eyes are blue, like his, but there's something in the back of his mind reminding him that they could still change.

He doesn't tell Jemma, but it sounds like her.

She's got wispy brown hair on the top of her head, a lot of it too.

Before they've made it across the room, he's already promised her a pony and her own spot in her parents’ lab and a dog, if Mum says yes, and he stops suddenly, realizing that there is just so much love for this person he's only just met and it's almost overwhelming.

It only intensifies watching Jemma hold her. His whole world wrapped up in one hospital bed and he thinks he never wants to leave this moment.

This does feel like love, but he decides easily love is too simple of a word to describe it.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I... can't really tell you what this is, if we're being frank with one another, but I hope you enjoyed it nonetheless. It started out as the brainchild of the first section of this fic and evolved to this 13k mess. How is it with FS that I always either write like 500 words or 13k? There's no in between.


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